101 Things To Do*

* before I die

History and Culture

Visit a Former Concentration Camp

The one I chose was Dachau near Munich in Germany - and what a powerful impact it had. Not so much from walking around the camp itself - though that was quite a sobering experience - but more from the photos of the prisoners interned there, like the one above.

And in a single image, this one tells a story of such sadness and suffering...

My tour of the camp did leave quite an impression, however, mostly by the sheer size of it. Only one of the barracks was still standing (actually having been rebuilt for the museum), but you could see the foundations of the rest, and there were a great many of them. They were designed to accommodate only 62 people in each but were usually filled with more than 100.

The final stop on my tour was the building that housed the ovens. These had been rebuilt as well, so they have never actually been used. But it was an incredible sight - designed to be as efficient as possible - but so morbid when you stop to think about what was to be "processed".